Lossless Audio Compression

There are two lossless compression methods that are especially widely used and available on virtually all operating systems, including: GNU/Linux, MS Windows, Macintosh OS X, BeOS, Solaris, and BSD Unix. FLAC ("free lossless audio codec") is a free, open-source program that provides a good compression ratio with fairly rapid compression and very rapid decompression. It is also the only lossless compression method with hardware support.

Shorten, often called shn, is a lossless compression system developed by Softsound. A variety of information and links to other resources can be obtained here. Source code can be downloaded here. A Macintosh OS X port and a version for MS Windows are available. MKW Audio Compression Tool reportedly also supports SHN compression under MS Windows.

Other lossless compression methods freely available for GNU/Linux and MS Windows include:

• Lossless Audio
• LPAC
• Monkey's Audio
• OptimFrog
• TTA
• Wavepack

A number of comparisons of compression ratio, compression speed, and decompression speed have been published:

• http://members.home.nl/w.speek/comparison.htm
• http://web.inter.nl.net/users/hvdh/lossless/lossless.htm
• http://www.lossless-audio.com/comparison.htm
• http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html

Ordered by compression ratio:

Ordered by compression time:

Ordered by decompression time:

With linguistic data as with music, Lossless Audio provides the best compression, at the cost of compression and decompression times considerably greater than those of other programs.